The Coming Copper Peak
Elon Musk told a closed-door Washington conference of miners, regulators and lawmakers that he sees a shortage of EV minerals coming, including copper and nickel (Scheyder 2019). Other rare metals used in cars include neodymium, lanthanum, terbium, and dysprosium (Gorman 2009).
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Richard A. Kerr. February 14, 2014. The Coming Copper Peak. Science 343:722-724.
Production of the vital metal will top out and decline within decades, according to a new model that may hold lessons for other resources.
If you take social unrest and environmental factors into account, the peak could be as early as the 2020s
As a crude way of taking account of social and environmental constraints on production, Northey and colleagues reduced the amount of copper available for extraction in their model by 50%. Then the peak that came in the late 2030s falls to the early 2020s, just a decade away.
After peak Copper
Whenever it comes, the copper peak will bring change. Graedel and his Yale colleagues reported in a paper published on 2 December 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that copper is one of four metals—chromium, manganese, and lead being the others—for which “no good substitutes are presently available for their major uses.”
If electrons are the lifeblood of a modern economy, copper makes up its blood vessels. In cables, wires, and contacts, copper is at the core of the electrical distribution system, from power stations to the internet. A small car has 20 kilograms (44 lbs) of copper in everything from its starter motor to the radiator; hybrid cars have twice that. But even in the face of exponentially rising consumption—reaching 17 million metric tons in 2012—miners have for 10,000 years met the world’s demand for copper.
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